Why Mark Zuckerberg thinks $19B for WhatsApp was a bargain

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Facebook Inc., reacts during a keynote session on the opening day of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, on Monday, Feb. 24, 2014. Angel Navarette / Bloomberg

The UpTake: For Mark Zuckerberg, whose goal is to have the entire world using Facebook products, $19 billion for an app to help him do that isn't a bad deal at all.

Mark Zuckerberg thinks he got a bargain on WhatsApp, the mobile messaging app that Facebook bought last week for $19 billion

"I just think that by itself it’s worth more than $19 billion," Zuckerberg said today at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. "The reality is there a very few services that reach a billion people in the world."

WhatsApp isn't there yet, but at 450 million users (up from an estimated 300 million in December), the Facebook CEO fully expects it to get there in short order. What's more, some 70 percent of WhatsApp users log in everyday.

Zuckerberg made the meat of his keynote address his efforts to to bring affordable Web connectivity to the two-thirds of the world without Internet access through Internet.org, a partnership between Facebook, Ericsson,MediaTek, Nokia, Opera, Qualcomm and Samsung.

Maybe electricity was cool when it first came out, but pretty quickly people stopped talking about it because it’s not the new thing, the real question you want to track at that point is are fewer people turning on their lights because it’s less cool?

David Kilpatrick, the founder of the Techonomy Conference who interviewed Zuckerberg onstage, asked Zuckerberg how much Facebook stands to gain by adding several billion more Internet users (and potential Facebook customers).

Zuckerberg said that Internet.org isn't entirely altruistic, but that Facebook and other backers are going to "lose money on this for quite a while."

The point is connecting more people to the Web and the tools that open up because of that.

"There's got to be something bigger," Zuckerberg said about Facebook's mission.

"I built the product originally because I wanted it at Harvard. But the vision was that some day someone would try to connect everyone in the world," he said. ""If we do something that's good for the world we'll find a way to profit from that."

One other thing: Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel, who rebuffed a $4 billion acquisition offer from Zuckerberg, shouldn't be expecting another bid from Facebook anytime soon.

"After buying a company for 16 billion dollars, you're probably done for a little while," Zuckerberg said, referring to the core price he paid for WhatsApp, an amount that didn't include $3 billion in restricted stock to the messaging company's founders and employees.

Alex is a Brooklyn-based freelance journalist. He writes about media entrepreneurs and creatives for Upstart Business Journal.

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